Ethics and Digital Government

Abstract

After considering the high costs to digital government of inadequate ethical choices, the role of ethics in government generally is reviewed. While codes of ethics may not go far toward resolving ethical challenges, they provide bases for ethical discourses and embody key ethical principles. Selected principles from the Code of Ethics of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) are applied to contemporary ethical issues in the context of digital government. In the rapidly evolving environments of digital technology, it is impossible to anticipate the leading-edge ethical issues. However, there are solid ethical or moral imperatives to use these principles for resolution of the issues.